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Issue 07 – Saint Rose 2021

Feuilleton

Feuilleton

Thoughts, musings, odds and ends.

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❖ Readers of this publication know that The Lamp offers something markedly different from any other Catholic magazine in the English-speaking world. It’s not just that we reject both the libertarian right and the antinomian left: we like to think that all sane people are beginning to do so, albeit inchoately; it is that we approach the questions of modern life as if what the Church teaches were actually true. (A crazy idea, we know!) The project we have undertaken, one in which we hope our readers will share, is very simply described: stripping away all of our merely secular prejudices and trying to think with the mind of the Church.

So far we have found that a good place to begin is with the words of Pope Francis. Without his social encyclicals—especially Laudato si’—it is unlikely that this magazine would exist. When the Holy Father has something to say about refugees or the environment or the pitfalls of social media or the pleasures of reading Dante, we believe Catholics should not only listen but meditate upon his words. This is not because we have an exaggerated understanding of papal authority—the selective ultramontanism of Catholics during the last three pontificates should be dispiriting to all of us—but precisely because we have the correct one. At least since the pontificate of Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching with Rerum novarum, well-formed Catholics have never erred in looking to the popes for guidance on the burning questions of the age: in the interwar era, for example, when they showed the world a third way between the chaos of laissez-faire and the totalitarianisms that emerged as a response to the former.


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